Well, good luck on Saturday.”
These were the five words Sean Salvati cheekily uttered to two RCMP officers on June 23, 2010, three days before the G20 summit. And with that one sentence, what had been a fun evening of friends and Blue Jays baseball quickly became a hellish 11-hour ordeal in which Salvati claims he was arrested, strip-searched, beaten, denied access to a lawyer and left naked in a cell for nearly an hour.
Scenes of Salvati’s ordeal were captured by police security cameras at a downtown police station and his lawyers have obtained several hours of footage through Freedom of Information requests.
In one video, Salvati is shown being led from an interrogation room by three officers and escorted naked past a female officer.
Salvati also alleges he was beaten while officers forcibly strip-searched him.
“One of the officers grabbed the neck and began punching me,” Salvati said in an interview with the Star Thursday. “(He) mentioned something about ‘These are your rights.’ You know? Like: ‘You think you have rights? These are your rights.’
“And I just started screaming.”
Salvati, a 33-year-old licensed paralegal, claims he was an innocent victim caught up in the G20’s overzealous security effort. The charge that allegedly got him thrown in jail — Salvati was pulled from a cab and arrested for public intoxication — was never filed in court.
He is suing the Toronto Police Services Board, the attorney general of Canada and four Toronto police officers for false arrest and imprisonment.
The lawsuit was filed in Ontario Superior Court late Thursday afternoon and seeks at least $75,000 in damages. Salvati further alleges police assaulted him in custody and violated his Charter rights by denying him access to a lawyer and subjecting him to cruel and unusual treatment when they locked him naked in a cell for 48 minutes.
Salvati’s allegations have not yet been proven in court and no statements of defence have been filed.
“You just never imagine when you go about your daily life that this is the kind of thing that could happen to you when you’ve done nothing wrong,” said lawyer Paul Quick, who is representing Salvati along with Murray Klippenstein. “And Sean hasn’t done anything wrong.”
When reached early Thursday night, police spokesman Mark Pugash said he was not in a position to comment because he could not confirm whether Toronto police had yet been served with Salvati’s lawsuit.
“You’re asking me questions that are at the heart of this man’s lawsuit and we haven’t seen the statement of claim,” Pugash said. “That will happen in due course but I think it’s entirely inappropriate to answer questions at this point before we’ve even had a chance to look at what he’s alleging.”
In his court filing, Salvati claims he and his friends encountered several police officers on the evening of June 23 and were intrigued by the robust security in downtown Toronto, stopping several times to chat and even take pictures with officers.
At the end of the night, while trying to hail a cab, Salvati said he encountered two female RCMP officers and tried to engage them in conversation, too. He said the officers ignored him, prompting Salvati to say they should be more polite because taxpayers are paying for their overtime.
He then saluted the officers and said, “Well, good luck with Saturday.”
The filing states Salvati hailed a cab to go to a friend’s house. At a red light, two police officers approached the taxi and pulled him out.
In his claim, Salvati alleges he was questioned “repeatedly about his comments to the two RCMP officers and, specifically, what he meant by his reference to ‘Saturday.’ During this time, the two RCMP officers that Mr. Salvati had spoken to earlier arrived at the scene . . . and identified Mr. Salvati as the person who had spoken to them.”
Salvati was then arrested for public intoxication. He claims in his court filing he had consumed slightly less than four glasses of beer in 5½ hours and was “in full control of his faculties.” He further alleges he requested a breathalyzer test but was denied.
“As soon as I was placed under arrest, I knew that something completely out of the ordinary was happening,” he said.
Salvati alleges he was taken to 52 Division near Dundas St. W. and University Ave. and subjected to a strip search because he had been “uncooperative” and would be lodged in the “general population.”
He claims he was then taken to a room by three officers, one of whom began to “strike and slap” him on his face and body and kneed him in the chest as the other two held his handcuffed arms.
Salvati further alleges one officer threatened to rip his nipple ring out but was urged by another officer not to because then he would require “medical.”
In his claim, Salvati said he was then taken from the room and escorted naked past a female officer and placed in an unoccupied single-person cell. He further alleges he was left naked for 48 minutes and at one point an officer placed his clothes on the floor in the hallway within his sights.
“It was punitive,” Salvati said. “I had said to a friend of mine, who took me to a doctor the next day, I told her that I felt like I’d been raped.”
After Salvati’s boxers and shirt were returned to him, he was visited by two men in plainclothes, according to his court filing. They would only identify themselves as “Officer C” and “Officer SIS” and led him to a separate interrogation room, where they “questioned him about the G20 summit, his alleged role in the anticipated protests, and his remark about ‘Saturday’ to the RCMP officers.”
(Saturday was the day of the largest protests of the G20 weekend, including a labour march, which police believed would be used as cover for anarchist groups bent on destruction.)
Salvati’s lawyers have since tried to obtain the names of these two men through a Freedom of Information request. They were told that 52 Division officers and the Professional Standards Unit had reviewed footage from a security camera and the two men could not be identified.
“It just defies common sense that an unidentified person could walk into 52 Division and meet privately with a prisoner and interrogate them . . . without someone having to say, ‘This is who I am. This is why I’m here,’ ” Quick said.
Salvati was released at 9:42 a.m., about 11 hours after he was pulled from his cab by police. He claims he was given an offence notice that he was charged under the Liquor Licence Act with being intoxicated in a public place. He learned six months later his charge was never filed in court.
Salvati said he has since filed a complaint about his arrest to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director but their investigations were only able to substantiate one of his claims, which is that he was not given access to a lawyer. This finding was deemed to be of a “less serious nature,” however.
Today, Salvati said he feels he was being punished that day for trying to assert his rights. The incident has left him traumatized and suspicious of police. A day after his release from jail, he saw a doctor and was given Valium for his anxiety.
A full year has passed since the G20 summit, but Salvati still has no answers for why this happened to him.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, at a Jays game three days before (the G20 summit) and I got caught up in it all,” he said. “And it’s changed my life.”
